Success*

We had a great weekend during our Free Feline special. 54 cats found new homes over the weekend which is great news for the cats who were adopted and the people who found a new best friend. The problem is that we still have 68 cats available for adoption and we are caring for another 168 cats that are soon going to be looking for new homes. You see, finding homes for 54 cats in 3 days is a great accomplishment, but during the same 3 days we took in 49 cats so on a weekend when we did a tremendous number of adoptions, we only saw a net benefit of 5 cats.

I don’t mean to seem discouraging, I just want people to understand the enormity of the problem we are trying to fight. There is an overwhelming overpopulation of cats in the capital region and it often seems like there are more and more cats instead of fewer. While we have been spaying or neutering every cat prior to adoption for over 4 years and now provide low cost spay/neuter services for people in need, the population of cats seems to be continuing to grow.

What is there for us to do? We have a pretty good idea of what works, we need to spay or neuter as many animals as we possibly can. If you are having trouble paying for surgery, contact us and we may be able to help. If you see feral cats in your neighborhood, we can help with that too, especially if you live in Colonie. Colonie will loan traps to town residents and we will spay or neuter feral cats from Colonie for free before returning them to where they were found. Unfortunately, these solutions take time and until we start seeing the numbers of cats going down, we will continue trying to get attention for those in need of homes.

2 Responses

Is there a way to track where the cats are coming from and work at the source? There has to be a way to educate people providing all these cats–surely??? The average person does not dump animals at a shelter, and dozens of “little old ladies” didn’t die and leave their pets behind this week. Perhaps public education classes/meetings/seminars could be held? I can’t believe people don’t do more and care more—so SICKENING!!!

We do track where animals come from and the intake generally mirrors human population. So as you would expect, the largest proportion comes from Albany followed by Troy and Colonie. If you look at intake of animals as a percentage of human population Colonie is slightly lower than the more urban Albany and Troy, but still the source of significant numbers of animals.

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